Finally decided to make a Twitter after 20 years to bitch about covid things online. I don't have any other social media since I live in a cave, so shoot me any of your good covid follows, leftist follows, or good follows in general. Any hashtags or flags I should put in my bio to mark my bonafides? Germ, Palestine, etc., or is that frowned upon?

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[–] AernaLingus@hexbear.net 4 points 1 week ago

I'm making these all Xcancel links so others can check them out, which I hope isn't too annoying—you can prevent the redirect by clicking "click here" on the interstitial page or clicking the Twitter icon in the upper right after the page loads.

@1goodtern - lots of good stats about COVID and COVID sequelae in the UK as well as narratives about patients (they work in healthcare in some capacity). Also some non-COVID related liberalism, but not much of that comes across my feed, thankfully. ** @michael_hoerger** - New Orleans-based maintainer of the PMC COVID-19 Data Dashboard, which is my go-to source for COVID transmission data in the US. Posts highlights from the weekly updates to Twitter, among other things.

@ghhughes - Does a ton of quantitative testing on masks (see his YouTube channel)

@NukitToBeSure - Chinese maker who mainly works on Far-UVC and filtration. Deep first-hand knowledge about the practicalities of manufacturing in Shenzhen, often calls out shoddy over overpriced Western products and has the data to back it up.

@nickelpin - LA-based artist and COVID activist who is a great source of inspiration on how to decorate, accessorize, and style masks

@openaeros - Minnesota-based project spearheaded by aerosol engineer Aaron Collins (a.k.a. The Mask Nerd) with the goal of producing an open source CPC (used for measuring air quality as well as doing quantitative fit tests for respirators) and and open source elastomeric mask. They've actually produced their first version of the OpenCPC, and I'm really looking forward to seeing what they come up with for the OpenRespirator (posted a video about their prototyping process here a while back). I think they are more active on Bluesky, for what its worth (@OpenAeros, @masknerd). Actually, it only just occurred to me to check if Bluesky has RSS feeds, and apparently it does! No idea how well they work, but here are the corresponding RSS feeds for OpenAeros and Aaron Collins.

Once you get following a few COVID conscious accounts and like their tweets, you should get a bunch more flowing through your For You page, so hopefully that's enough to get you started!

A lot of COVID twitter can be fairly lib/privileged, so honestly I could use some help in finding accounts that have a more leftist bent. That said, I don't think you'll have any issues with putting the watermelon/Palestinian flag emojis in your handle. Also if someone can recommend good leftist Twitter accounts that actually tweet out useful/informative stuff instead of spending all day dunking on chuds and thus dragging the most reactionary garbage onto my FYP madeline-deadpan

Also, I'm 100% a lurker, so other folks can probably (and hopefully will) give better advice about the social conventions and whatnot.